From the San Fernando Courthouse it was only a block’s walk back to the old jail where Bosch did his file work. He covered the distance quickly, a spring in his step caused by the search warrant in his hand. Judge Atticus Finch Landry had read it in chambers and asked Bosch a few perfunctory questions before signing the approval page. Bosch now had the authority to execute the search and hopefully find the bullet that would lead to an arrest and the closing of another case.
He took the shortcut through the city’s Public Works yard to the back door of the old jail. He pulled the key to the padlock as he moved toward the former drunk tank, where the open-case files were kept on steel shelves. He found that he had left the lock open and silently chastised himself. It was a breach of his own as well as departmental protocol. The files were to be kept locked up at all times. And Bosch liked to keep the matters on his desk secure too, even during a forty-minute search-warrant run to the courthouse next door.
He moved behind his makeshift desk — and old wooden door set across two stacks of file boxes — and sat down. Immediately, he saw the twisted paper clip sitting on top of his closed laptop.
He stared at it. He had not put it there.
“You forgot that.”
Bosch looked up. The woman — the detective — from the night before at Hollywood Station was straddling the old bench that ran between the freestanding shelves full of case files. She had been out of his line of sight as he came into the cell. He looked over at the open door where the padlock dangled from its chain.
“Ballard, right?” he said. “Good to know I’m not going crazy. I thought I had locked up.”
“I let myself in,” Ballard said. “Lock picking 101.”
“It’s a good skill to have. Meantime, I’m kind of busy here. Just got a search warrant I need to figure out how to execute without my suspect finding out. What do you want, Detective Ballard?”
“I want in.”
“In?”
“On Daisy Clayton.”
Bosch considered her for a moment. She was attractive, maybe midthirties, with brown, sun-streaked hair cut at the shoulders and a slim, athletic build. She was wearing off-duty clothes. The night before, she had been in work clothes that made her seem more formidable — a must in the LAPD, where Bosch knew female detectives were often treated like office secretaries.
Ballard also had a deep tan, which to Bosch was at odds with the idea of someone who worked the graveyard shift. Most of all he was impressed that it had been only twelve hours since she had surprised him at the file cabinets in the Hollywood detective bureau and she already appeared to have caught up to him and what he was doing.
“I talked to your old partner, Lucy,” Ballard said. “She gave me her blessing. It is a Hollywood Station case, after all.”
“Was — till RHD took it,” Bosch said. “They have standing now, not Hollywood.”
“And what’s your standing? You’re out of the LAPD. Doesn’t seem to be any link to the town of San Fernando that I could see in the book.”
In his capacity as an SFPD reserve officer for the past three years, Bosch had largely been working on a backlog of cold cases of all kinds — murders, rapes, assaults. But the work was part-time.
“They give me a lot of freedom up here,” Bosch said. “I work these cases and I also work my own. Daisy Clayton’s one of my own. You could say I have a vested interest. That’s my standing.”
“And I have twelve boxes of shake cards at Hollywood Station,” Ballard said.
Bosch nodded. He was even more impressed. She had somehow figured out exactly what he had gone to Hollywood for. As he studied her, he decided it wasn’t all a tan. She had a mix of races in her skin. He guessed that she was probably half white, half Polynesian.
“I figure between the two of us, we could get through them in a couple nights,” Ballard said.
There was the offer. She wanted in and would give Bosch what he was looking for in trade.
“The shake cards are a long shot,” he said. “Truth is, I’ve run the string out on the case. I was hoping there might be something in the cards.”
“That’s surprising,” Ballard said. “I heard you’re the kind of guy who never lets the string run out — your old partner called you a dog with a bone.”
Bosch didn’t know what to say to that. He shrugged.
Ballard got up and walked toward him down the aisle between the shelves.
“Sometimes it’s slow, sometimes it isn’t,” she said. “I’m going to start looking through the cards tonight. Between calls. Anything in particular I should look for?”
Bosch paused but knew he needed to make a decision. Trust her or keep her on the outside.
“Vans,” he said. “Look for work vans, guys who carry chemicals maybe.”
“For transporting her,” she said.
“For the whole thing.”
“It said in the book the guy took her home or to a motel. Some place with a bathtub. For the bleaching.”
Bosch shook his head.
“No, he didn’t use a bathtub,” he said.
She stared at him, waiting, not asking the obvious question of how he knew.
“All right, come with me,” he finally said.
He got up and led her out of the cell and back to the door to the Public Works yard.
“You looked at the book and the photos, right?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Everything that was digitized.”
They walked into the yard, which was a large open-air square surrounded by walls. Along the back wall there were four bays delineated by tool racks and workbenches where city equipment and vehicles were maintained and repaired. Bosch led Ballard into one of these.
“You saw the mark on the body?”
“The A-S-P?”
“Right. But they got the meaning of it wrong. The original detectives. They went down a spiral with it and it was all wrong.”
He went to a workbench and reached up to a shelf where there was a large, translucent plastic tub with a blue snap-on top. He brought it down and held it out to her.
“Twenty-five-gallon container,” Bosch said. “Daisy was five-two, a hundred and five pounds. Small. He put her in one of these, then put in the bleach as needed. He didn’t use a bathtub.”
Ballard studied the container. Bosch’s explanation was plausible but not conclusive.
“That’s a theory,” she said.
“No theory,” he said.
He put the container down on the floor so he could unsnap the top. He then lifted the tub up and angled it so she could see into it. He reached inside and pointed to a manufacturer’s seal stamped into the plastic at the bottom. It was a two-inch circle with the A-S-P reading horizontally and vertically in the center.
“A-S-P,” he said. “American Storage Products or American Soft Plastics. Same company, two names. The killer put her in one of these. He didn’t need a bathtub or a motel. One of these and a van.”
Ballard reached into the container and ran a finger over the manufacturer’s seal. Bosch knew she was drawing the same conclusion he had. The logo was stamped into the plastic on the underside of the tub, creating a ridged impression on the inside. If Daisy’s skin had been pressed against the ridges, the logo would have left its mark.
Ballard pulled her arm out and looked up from the tub to Bosch.
“How’d you figure this out?” she asked.
“I thought like he did,” Bosch said.
“Let me guess, these are untraceable.”
“They make them in Gardena, ship them to retailers everywhere. They do some direct sales to commercial accounts but as far as individual sales go, forget it. You can get these at every Target and Walmart in the country.”
“Well, shit.”
“Yeah.”
Bosch snapped the top back on the tub and was about to return it to the high shelf.
“Can I take it?” Ballard asked.
Bosch turned to her. He knew he could replace it and that she could easily get her own. He guessed it was a move to draw him further into a partnership. If he gave her something, then it meant they were working together.
He handed the tub over.
“It’s yours,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said.
She looked at the open gate to the Public Works yard.
“Okay, so I start tonight on the shakes,” she said.
Bosch nodded.
“Where were they?” he asked.
“In storage,” Ballard said. “Nobody wanted to throw them out.”
“I figured. It was smart.”
“What were you going to do if you found them still in the file cabinets?”
“I don’t know. Probably ask Money if I could hang around and look through them.”
“Were you just going to look at cards from the day or week of the murder? The month maybe?”
“No, all of them. Whatever they still had. Who’s to say the guy who did this didn’t get FI-ed a couple years before or a year after?”
Ballard nodded.
“No stone uncovered. I get it.”
“That make you change your mind? It’ll be a lot of work.”
“Nope.”
“Good.”
“Well, I’m gonna go. Might even go in early to get started.”
“Happy hunting. If I can come by, I will. But I have a search warrant to execute.”
“Right.”
“Otherwise, call me if you find something.”
He reached into a pocket and produced a business card with his cell number on it.
“Copy that,” she said.
Ballard walked off, holding the container in front of her by the indented grips on either side. As Bosch watched, she made a smooth U-turn and came back to him.
“Lucy Soto said you know Daisy’s mother,” she said. “Is that the standing you said you had?”
“I guess you could say that,” Bosch said.
“Where’s the mother — if I want to talk to her?”
“My house. You can talk to her anytime.”
“You live with her?”
“She’s staying with me. It’s temporary. Eighty-six-twenty Woodrow Wilson.”
“Okay. Got it.”
Ballard turned again and walked off. Bosch watched her go. She made no further U-turns.
Bosch went back into the jail to get the search warrant and to close and lock the cold-case cell. He then crossed First Street and entered the SFPD detective bureau through the side door off the parking lot. He saw two of the unit’s full-time detectives at their workstations. Bella Lourdes was the senior detective most often paired with Bosch when his investigations took him out into the streets. She had a soft, motherly look that camouflaged her skills and toughness. Oscar Luzon was older than Lourdes but the most recent transfer to the detective unit. He had a sedentary thickness settling in and liked wearing his badge on a chain around his neck like a narc instead of on his belt. Otherwise, it might not be seen. Danny Sisto, the third member of the team, was not present.
Bosch checked Captain Trevino’s office and found the door open and the detective commander behind his desk. He looked up from some paperwork at Bosch.
“How’d it go?” Trevino asked.
“Sign, sealed, delivered,” Bosch said, holding the warrant up as proof. “You want to get everybody in the war room to talk about how we do this?”
“Yeah, bring Bella and Oscar in. Sisto’s out at a crime scene, so he won’t make it. I’ll pull somebody in from patrol.”
“What about LAPD?”
“Let’s figure it out first and then I’ll call Foothill and make it a captain-to-captain thing.”
Trevino was picking up the phone to call the watch office as he spoke. Bosch ducked back out and used the warrant to signal Lourdes and Luzon to the war room. Bosch went in, took a yellow pad off the supply table and sat at one end of the oval meeting table. The so-called war room was really a multipurpose room. It was used for training classes, as a lunchroom, as an emergency command post, and on occasion as a place to strategize investigations and tactics with the whole detective squad — all five members of it.
Bosch sat down and flipped over the cover sheet of the warrant so he could reread the probable-cause section he had composed. It was drawn from a fourteen-year-old murder case. The victim was Cristobal Vega, fifty-two, who was shot once in the back of the head while he was walking his dog up his street to Pioneer Park. Vega was a veteran gang member, a shot caller for Varrio San Fer 13, one of the oldest and most violent gangs in the San Fernando Valley.
His death was a shock to the tiny town of San Fernando because he was well known within the community after having publicly adopted a Godfather-like presence, deciding neighborhood disputes, contributing major funds to local churches and schools, and even delivering food baskets to the needy during the holidays.
It was a good-guy disguise that cloaked a thirty-plus-year run as a gangster. On the inside of the VSF, he was notoriously violent and known by the moniker Uncle Murda. He moved with two bodyguards at all times and rarely strayed from SanFer turf, because he had been “green-lit” by all surrounding gangs as a result of his leadership position and planning of violent forays into other turf. The Vineland Boyz wanted him dead. The Pacas wanted him dead. Pacoima Flats wanted him dead. And so on.
The killing of Uncle Murda was also surprising because Vega had been caught on the street alone. He had a handgun tucked into the waist of his sweatpants but had apparently thought he was safe to duck out of his fortified home and take his dog to the park shortly after dawn. He never made it. He was found facedown on the sidewalk a block short of the park. His assassin had approached so stealthily from behind that Vega had not even pulled the gun from his waistband.
Though Vega was a hood and a killer himself, the SFPD investigation into his murder had initially been intense. But no witness to the shooting was ever found and the only evidence recovered was the .38 caliber bullet removed during autopsy from the victim’s brain. No competing gang from the area took credit for the kill, and graffiti that either lamented or celebrated Vega’s demise offered no clue as to who or what gang had carried out the hit.
The case went cold and detectives who were assigned due-diligence checks on it each year did not muster a lot of enthusiasm. It was clearly a case where the victim’s death was not seen as much of a loss to society. The world was doing just fine without Uncle Murda.
But when Bosch opened the files as part of his cold-case review, he took a different approach. He had always operated according to the axiom that everybody counts in this world or nobody counts. This belief dictated that he must give each case and each victim his best effort. The fact that Uncle Murda had gotten his moniker because of his willingness to carry out the deadly business of the VSF did not deter Bosch from wanting to find his killer. In Bosch’s book, nobody should be able to come up behind a man on a sidewalk at dawn, put a bullet in his brain, and then disappear into the shadows of time. There was a murderer out there. He might have killed since and he might kill again. Bosch was coming for him.
The time of death was determined by various factors. Vega’s wife said he had gotten up at six a.m. and taken the dog out the door about twenty minutes later. The coroner could only narrow it down to the 100 minutes between then and eight a.m., which was when his body was discovered by a resident near the park. Two canvasses by detectives in the neighborhood produced not a single resident who reported hearing the shot, leading to the conclusion that the shooter might have used a silencer on his weapon — or the entire neighborhood did not want to cooperate with police.
While there were many handicaps in the investigation of years-old cases — loss of evidence, witnesses, crime scenes — the element of time could also be advantageous. Bosch always looked for ways to turn time in his favor.
In the Cristobal Vega investigation, a lot had happened in the fourteen years since the murder. Many of the gangsters in the VSF and its rivals had gone to prison for various crimes, including murder. Some had gone straight and cut ties with the life. These were the people Bosch focused on, using database searches and conversations with gang unit officers in the SFPD and from nearby LAPD divisions to produce two lists of gangsters in prison or believed to be in the straight life.
Over the previous year, he had made numerous prison stops and conducted dozens of visits to the homes and workplaces of men who had left their gang affiliations behind. Each conversation was tailored to the circumstances of the man he was visiting but in each instance questioning casually moved toward the unsolved killing of Cristobal Vega.
Most of the conversations were dead ends. The subject either maintained the code of silence or had no knowledge of the Vega killing. But eventually pieces of information started to create the mosaic. When he heard more than three denials of involvement from members of the same gang he moved that gang off the suspect list. Eventually he had scratched every one of the SanFer rivals off the list. It wasn’t conclusive but it was enough to turn his focus inward at Vega’s own gang.
Bosch eventually struck pay dirt in the rear parking lot of a discount shoe store in Alhambra, east of Los Angeles. The store was where a man named Martin Perez, a reformed SanFer, worked as an inventory manager far away from the turf he once trod. Perez was forty-one years old and had shed his gang affiliation twelve years earlier. Though he had been carried in gang unit intel files as a hard-core member of the SanFers since he was sixteen, he had escaped the life with several arrests on his record but no convictions. He had never been to prison and had spent only a few days here and there in county jail.
The files Bosch reviewed contained color photos of the tattoos that adorned most parts of Perez’s body during his active years. Included in these was an RIP UNCLE MURDA ink job on his neck. This put him high on the list of men Bosch wanted to talk to.
Bosch staked out the shoe store’s parking lot and spotted Perez stepping out back to smoke a cigarette while on a three p.m. break. Through a pair of binoculars Bosch confirmed that Perez still carried the tattoo on his neck. He noted the time of the break and then drove away.
The next day he came back shortly before break time. He was dressed in blue jeans and a denim work shirt with permanent stains on it and carried a soft pack of Marlboro reds in the breast pocket. When he saw Perez behind the shop, he casually joined him, holding a cigarette up and asking if he could borrow a light. Perez flicked a lighter and Bosch leaned in to ignite his smoke.
Leaning back away, Bosch mentioned the tattoo he had just seen up close and asked how Uncle Murda died. Perez responded by saying that Uncle Murda was a good man who had been set up by his own people.
“How come?” Bosch asked.
“Because he got greedy,” Perez said.
Bosch pushed no further. He finished his cigarette — the first he had smoked in years — and thanked Perez for the light, then walked away.
That night, Bosch knocked on the door of Perez’s apartment. He was accompanied by Bella Lourdes. This time he identified himself, as did Lourdes, and told Perez he had a problem. He pulled his phone and played a snippet of the conversation they had shared while smoking behind the shoe store. Bosch explained that Perez had knowledge about a gang murder but had deliberately withheld it from authorities. This was obstruction of justice — a crime — not to mention conspiracy to commit murder, which would be the charges he would face unless he agreed to cooperate.
Perez took the option of cooperating, but he did not want to go to the San Fernando Police Department lest he be spotted in the old neighborhood by someone he used to run with. Bosch made a call to an old friend who worked in the Sheriff’s Department homicide unit in Whittier and arranged to borrow an interview room for a couple hours.
The threat of charges against Perez was largely a bluff by Bosch, but it worked. Perez was deathly afraid of the L.A. County jail and the California prison system. He said both were well stocked with members of the eMe — the Mexican Mafia — which had a strong alliance with the VSF and was known for its brutal crimes against those who snitched or were perceived to be vulnerable to law enforcement pressure to flip. Perez believed that he would be marked for death whether he snitched or not. He chose to put everything on the table in hopes of convincing Bosch and Lourdes that he was not the killer but knew who was.
The story Perez told was as old as the crime of murder itself. Vega had risen to a place of power in the gang, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. He was taking more than his share in proceeds from the SanFers’ criminal enterprises and was also known to force sexual relations on young women associated with members on the lower tiers of the gang. Many of those young vatos despised him. One named Tranquillo Cortez plotted against him. According to Perez, he was the nephew of Vega’s wife and was incensed by Vega’s greed and very public infidelities.
Perez was in Cortez’s clique within the gang and was privy to part of the planning but insisted he was not present when Cortez killed Vega. The case had long been considered the perfect hit within the SFPD, because no evidence other than a bullet had been left behind. So this was where Bosch and Lourdes pressed Perez, asking many questions about the gun, its ownership, and its present whereabouts.
Perez said the gun was Cortez’s own gun but had no information on how Cortez came to own it. As far as what happened to the weapon after the murder, he had no idea because he soon separated himself from the gang and left the Valley. But Perez did provide a piece of information that gave Bosch his focus. He said that Cortez had equipped the gun with a homemade silencer. This fit with the original investigation.
Bosch zeroed in, asking how Cortez had made the silencer. Perez said that at the time, Cortez worked in an uncle’s muffler shop in nearby Pacoima, and he had machined it out of the same piping and internal sound-suppressing materials used in motorcycle mufflers. He did this after hours and without his uncle’s knowledge. Perez also acknowledged that he and two other fellow gang members were with Cortez in the shop when he tested his creation by attaching it to his gun and firing a couple of shots into the back wall of the muffler shop.
After the interview with Perez, the priority for the investigators became confirming as much of his story as possible. Lourdes was able to nail down the link between Cortez and Vega’s wife. She was his father’s sister. She also determined that Cortez’s standing within the VSF had risen over the past fourteen years and he was now a shot caller like the man he was suspected of assassinating. Meanwhile, Bosch confirmed that Pacoima Tire & Muffler, located on San Fernando Road in Los Angeles, was previously owned by Helio Cortez, the suspect’s uncle, and that the new owner’s name was not in any gang intel files of the San Fernando and Los Angeles police departments. Other details were substantiated and it all added up to enough probable cause for Bosch to go see a judge for a search warrant.
He had that now and it was time to move the case forward.
Lourdes and Luzon were the first to enter the war room. Soon they were followed by Trevino and then Sergeant Irwin Rosenberg, a dayside watch commander. In accordance with department protocol, all search warrants were served with a uniformed presence, and Rosenberg, a veteran street cop with high people skills, would coordinate that side of things. Everyone took seats around the oval table.
“What, no doughnuts?” Rosenberg asked.
The table was usually where the spread of food donated by citizens ended up. Almost every morning there were doughnuts or breakfast burritos. Rosenberg’s disappointment was shared by all.
“All right, let’s get this going,” Trevino said. “What’ve we got, Harry? You should bring Irwin up to speed.”
“This is the Cristobal Vega case,” Bosch said. “The murder of Uncle Murda fourteen years ago. We have a search warrant allowing us to enter Pacoima Tire & Muffler on San Fernando Road and search for bullets fired into the rear wall of the main garage fourteen years ago. This place is on LAPD turf, so we will coordinate with them. We want to do it as unobtrusively as possible so word doesn’t get back to our suspect or anybody else with the SanFers. We want to keep this quiet until it’s time to hopefully make an arrest.”
“It’s going to be impossible with the SanFers,” Rosenberg said. “They have eyes all over the place.”
Bosch nodded.
“We know that,” he said. “Bella’s been working on a cover story. We just need to buy a couple days. If we find slugs, then I have it greased down at the lab. They’ll ASAP the comparison to the bullet that killed Vega. If there’s a match, we’ll be good to go at our suspect.”
“Who is the suspect?” Rosenberg asked.
Bosch hesitated. He trusted Rosenberg but it was not good case management to discuss suspects — especially when there was an informant involved.
“Never mind,” Rosenberg said quickly. “I don’t need to know. So, do you want to keep this to one car, two uniforms?”
“At the most,” Bosch said.
“Done. We’ve got the new SUV in the yard that just came in. Hasn’t been decaled yet. We could use that, not advertise we’re from SFPD. That might help.”
Bosch nodded. He had seen the SUV in the Public Works yard by the old jail. It had arrived from the manufacturer in black-and-white paint but the SFPD identifiers had not been applied to its doors and rear hatch. It could blend in with the LAPD vehicles and help disguise that the search was part of an SFPD investigation. It would further insulate the investigation from the VSF.
“In case we have to take out the whole wall, we’ll have a Public Works crew with us,” Bosch said. “They’ll be using an unmarked truck.”
“So what’s our cover?” Luzon asked.
“Burglary,” Lourdes said. “If anybody asks, we say somebody broke in during the night and there’s a crime scene. It should do it. The place is no longer owned by the suspect’s uncle. As far as we can tell, the new owner is clean, and we expect his full cooperation with both the search and the cover story.”
“Good,” Trevino said. “When do we go?”
“Tomorrow morning,” Bosch said. “Right when the place opens at seven. With any luck we’ll be in and out before most gangsters in the neighborhood open their eyes for the day.”
“Okay,” Trevino said. “Let’s rally here at six and be in Pacoima when they open the doors.”
The meeting broke up after that and Bosch followed Lourdes back to her workstation.
“Hey, I had a visitor to my cell earlier,” he said. “Did you send her over?”
Lourdes shook her head.
“No, nobody came in here,” she said. “I’ve been doing reports all day.”
Bosch nodded. He wondered about Ballard and how she knew where to find him. His guess was that Lucia Soto had told her.
He knew he would find out soon enough.
Bosch got home early. He smelled cooking as soon as he opened the door, and found Elizabeth Clayton in the kitchen. She was sautéing chicken in butter and garlic.
“Hey,” Bosch said. “Smells good.”
“I wanted to make you something,” she said.
They awkwardly hugged while she was in front of the stove. When Bosch first met her, she was an addict trying to bury her daughter’s murder under a mountain of pills. She had had a shaved head, weighed ninety pounds, and would have willingly traded sex for thirty milligrams of guilt- and memory-blurring oxycodone.
Seven months later, she was clean and had put on twenty pounds, and her sandy-blond hair was long enough to frame the pretty face that had emerged during recovery. But the guilt and memories were still there at the edge of darkness and threatening every day.
“That’s great,” he said. “I’m going to clean up first, okay?”
“It’ll be a half hour,” she said. “I have to boil the noodles.”
Bosch walked down the hallway, past Elizabeth’s room, and into his own. He took off his work clothes and got into the shower. As the water cascaded down on his head, he thought about cases and victims. The woman cooking his dinner was a victim of the fallout that comes from murder, her daughter taken in a way too horrible to contemplate. Bosch thought he had rescued Elizabeth the year before. He had helped her through addiction and now she was straight and healthy, but the addiction had been what buffered reality and kept that contemplation away. He had promised her he would solve her daughter’s killing but now found that he could not talk to her about the case without causing her the kind of pain she used to vanquish with pills. He was left with the question of whether he had rescued her at all.
After showering he shaved, because he knew it might be a couple days before he got the next chance. He was finishing up when he heard Elizabeth call him to dinner.
In the months since Elizabeth had moved in, Bosch had returned the dining room to its rightful purpose. He had moved his laptop and the files from the cases he was working into his bedroom, where he had a folding table set up. He didn’t think she should be constantly reminded of murder, especially when he wasn’t around.
She had place settings across from each other at the table and the food on another plate between them. She served him. There were two glasses of water. No alcohol.
“Looks great,” Bosch said.
“Well, let’s hope it tastes great,” she said.
They ate silently for a few minutes and Bosch complimented her. The chicken had a good garlic kick that tasted great going down. He knew it would kick back later on but didn’t mention that.
“How was group?” he asked.
“Mark Twain dropped out,” she said.
She always referred to others in her daily group therapy meetings by code names drawn from famous people they reminded her of. Mark Twain had white hair and a bushy mustache. There was a Cher, an Albert (as in Einstein), an OJ, a Lady Gaga, and a Gandhi, who was also referred to as Ben, as in Ben Kingsley, the actor who won an Oscar for portraying him.
“Permanently?” Bosch asked.
“Looks like it,” she said. “He had a slip and went back into lockdown.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Yeah. I liked hearing his stories. They were funny.”
More silence passed between them. Bosch tried to think of something to say or ask. The awkwardness of the relationship had grown to be the main part of it. Bosch had long known that inviting her to use a room in his house had been a mistake. He wasn’t sure what he had thought would come of it. Elizabeth reminded Bosch of his former wife, Eleanor, but that was only a physical resemblance. Elizabeth Clayton was a badly damaged person with dark memories to work through and a difficult path ahead.
It had been only a temporary invitation — an until-you-get-on-your-feet thing. Bosch had converted a large storage room off the hallway into a small bedroom and furnished it with purchases from Ikea. But it had been almost six months and Bosch was unsure that Elizabeth would or could ever stand on her feet alone again. The call of her addiction was always there. The memory of her daughter was like a malignant ghost that followed her. And she had nowhere to go, except maybe back up to Modesto, where she had lived until her world fell apart with a midnight call from the LAPD.
Meantime, Bosch had alienated his daughter, who had not been consulted before he extended the invitation. She was away at college and came home less and less already, but the addition of Elizabeth Clayton to the household served to stop all visitation. Now Bosch saw Maddie only when he ventured down to Orange County to grab a quick breakfast or late dinner with her. On the last visit, she had announced that she planned to stay the summer in the house she rented with three other students near campus. Bosch took the news as a direct reaction to having Elizabeth in his house.
“I have to work tonight,” Bosch said.
“I thought you said you had that search warrant thing tomorrow morning,” Elizabeth said.
“I do but this is something else. It’s about Daisy.”
He said nothing further until he could gauge her response. A few moments went by and she didn’t try to change the subject.
“There’s a Hollywood detective who’s interested in the case,” he said. “She came to me today and asked questions. She’s on the late show and is going to work it when she has time.”
“‘The late show’?” Elizabeth asked.
“That’s what they call the midnight shift at Hollywood Division, because of all the crazy stuff that happens there in the middle of the night. Anyway, she found some old records I’d been looking for: cards where patrol officers took names of people on the street, people they stopped or were suspicious of.”
“Was Daisy one of them?”
“Probably, but that’s not why I want to see them. I want to see who else was floating around Hollywood at that time. It could lead to something.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, there are twelve boxes of them. We’ll do what we can tonight and then I have the search warrant in the morning. It could be a couple nights going down there.”
“Okay. I hope you find something.”
“The detective — her name is Ballard — asked about you. She said she might want to meet with you. Would that be okay?”
“Of course. I don’t really know anything that can help but I will talk to anybody about Daisy.”
Bosch nodded. It had been more than they had said about the case in weeks and he worried it would send Elizabeth into a dark spiral of depression if he pushed it further.
He checked his watch. It wasn’t quite eight o’clock.
“I might take a nap for a couple hours before I head down there,” he said. “That okay?”
“Yes, you should,” she said. “I’ll clean all this up and try to be quiet.”
“Don’t worry about it. I doubt I’ll sleep. I’ll just rest.”
Fifteen minutes later Bosch was on his back, looking up at the ceiling in his bedroom. He could hear the water running in the kitchen and the dishes being stacked in the rack next to the sink.
He had set an alarm but knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep.